Americans love to advocate for small businesses in theory, but the reality is that entrepreneurship is a solitary journey. With excessive formation costs and mystifying regulations, the decks are stacked against entrepreneurs from day 1. We’ve all seen the clickbaity headlines: “X% of new businesses fail within the first Y years.”

Let’s say you’ve beaten those odds with your new business and made some sales. Congrats! After you’ve paid your employees, your vendors, your rent, etc., maybe there’s enough money leftover for you to take home.

But wait — one of your clients is late paying their invoice, so there’s actually not enough leftover to pay yourself. In fact, maybe there’s not even enough to cover those other expenses. You try reminding the client by email, by phone, by mail, but they just won’t pay.

Why don’t they just take these clients to court, you ask? Because the legal system is largely inaccessible to most business owners. The costs to take a delinquent client to court can outweigh the amount you’re actually owed at a hair-raising pace.

We’re fed up. We’re tired of being used as promotional props and political currency while our real problems are ignored by the public and politicians alike. As late-20-somethings, maybe we can’t tackle every issue plaguing entrepreneurs, but we can start with these unpaid invoices. Entrepreneurs work too hard to go uncompensated by their clients, as we’ve experienced first-hand.

So we’re making it our mission to collect $1,000,000 in unpaid invoices and put that money back into the hands of small businesses. It may barely be a dent in that $825 billion, but it’s a positive start. And to the individual entrepreneurs whom we help along the way, it could be the difference between paying themselves and not, between hiring new employees and not, between shutting down and not.

We want you to follow along with our journey toward collecting $1,000,000. We’ll transparently share our ups and our downs. We’ll have candid conversations about our own business and with other entrepreneurs about theirs. And most importantly, we’ll put hard-earned money back into the hands of Americans.

Follow Along As We Put $1,000,000 Back Into The Hands of Small Businesses